👍 The Force Is Still Strong with the “Star Wars” Composer John Williams

When Williams set to work in the second week of January, 1977—he gave me the date after consulting an old diary—he fell back on the techniques of golden-age Hollywood: brief, sharply defined motifs; brilliant, brassy orchestration; a continuous fabric of underscoring. The film-music scholar Emilio Audissino has described the “Star Wars” score and others by Williams as “neoclassical,” meaning that they draw on a sumptuously orchestrated style associated with such Central European émigrés as Steiner and Erich Wolfgang Korngold. “Neoclassical” is a better label than “neo-Romantic,” since Williams is so steeped in mid-twentieth-century influences: jazz, popular standards, Stravinsky, and Aaron Copland, among others. When he writes for a Wagnerian or Straussian orchestra, he airs out the textures and gives them rhythmic bounce. “The Imperial March,” from “The Empire Strikes Back,” for example, has a bright, brittle edge, with skittering figures in winds and strings surrounding an expected phalanx of brass.